Table Manner: The Role of the Table in Contemporary Art

This is an ongoing project based on research during my studies at Goldsmiths in London in 2005. This exhibition was conceived in 2005 and I have been adding to the artist list over the past 5 years. Below is an excerpt from my dissertation. Please stay tuned for details on the publishing of the book about how this project will evolve from the published form to 5 small scale exhibitions.

"The first stage of this project, as you will see explained here, is a book comprised of the chosen artists’ table works. Certain combinations of work may be problematic, but grouping the works is solely linked by the physical presence of a table. The purpose of the book is to illustrate the range of exploration and the multiple uses and interpretations of this everyday object. As an exhibition, the pieces could represent a single horizon line in a vast sea of artist’s tables. In an effort to categorize without misinterpretation, a flow chart shows a “spanning of the eras” where each artist and piece connect to a time period or stylistic moment in art history. With this subheading in mind, Table Manner must not be a monotonous installation, but a productive exercise in sculptural art history where tables (readymade or constructed) are used as the common element that link artist tendencies to present tables often over looked. Table Manner is an exhibition that wholly focuses on the "objectness" of the table when used as sculpture. Looking back, there becomes a shift with Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and his harsh introduction to the readymade that sets the trend that will make the role of the plinth in sculpture, virtually obsolete.

Although Table Manner has a taxonomic and typological organization (a species of furniture— ‘tables’ divided into various subgenus categories— ‘ritual’, ‘social’ etc) its main objective is to highlight the continual embrace of the pure physicality of the art object. Trying to avoid a tendency to lump the works together by literal means, realizing the nearly infinite number of artists who make ‘tables’ at some point in their career, Table Manner is a conscious attempted to organize an exhibition that focuses solely on the sculptural presence of the table. This arduous research process led to a discovery of an interesting challenge in analyzing the distinctions between the chosen artists’ and their pieces that force the viewer to ‘unsee’ the ‘table’ as a table and instead focus on its aesthetic qualities." -Turkovic, London, 2005